Edwin H. Land Is Dead at 81; Inventor of Polaroid Camera

By ERIC PACE

Published: March 2, 1991

Edwin H. Land, whose invention of an instant camera changed the picture-taking habits of millions of people around the world, died yesterday in a hospital in Cambridge, Mass. He was 81 years old and lived in Cambridge.

For decades, as head of the Polaroid Corporation, Dr. Land provided the ideas and impetus for a long line of innovative photographic products.

The family declined to disclose the cause of death.

It was in response to his 3-year-old daughter's bewilderment at why a camera could not instantly produce pictures that Dr. Land conceived the idea of the instant camera in 1943. Dr. Land, a largely self-taught physicist, was out for a stroll when he hit upon the idea that led to his invention: a camera that would produce developed photographs as soon as its shutter clicked.

As Polaroid's longtime guiding light, he oversaw the development of products that included the first Polaroid Land Camera of 1948 and a long succession of other devices in the field that he termed instant photography.

Under Dr. Land, Polaroid's products gained wide acceptance. In the 1960's, a Polaroid marketing executive estimated that half the households in the United States had acquired Polaroid cameras.

That pioneering by Dr. Land, who held 533 patents by the time he retired in 1982, reflected what he said was a basic trait in himself and other scientists who were inventors.

"As I review the nature of the creative drive in the inventive scientists that have been around me, as well as in myself," he once wrote, "I find the first event is an urge to make a significant intellectual contribution that can be tangibly embodied in a product or process."

Over the decades Dr. Land lavished energy and creativity on the art of running a technologically innovative company. He spurred inventiveness among his colleagues at Polaroid and he repeatedly led efforts to overcome urgent technical problems that arose. Research and Manufacturing

He was also an ardent advocate of the importance of research. "I believe quite simply that the small company of the future will be as much a research organization as it is a manufacturing company," he wrote in 1944, while Polaroid was still modest in size, "and that this new kind of company is the frontier for the next generation."

Under his guidance Polaroid, which has been based in Cambridge since 1940, flourished after it began selling its instant-photography products.

The company ran into notable problems in the 1970's, including some involving the technically elegant SX-70, an instant camera with complex optics. Movie System Flops

Polaroid stock soared on expectations of explosive growth that proved unfounded, then plummeted. It fell to $14.13 a share from $149.50 between May 1972 and July 1974.

Describing those events in a 1987 book, "Land's Polaroid: a Company and the Man Who Invented It," Peter C. Wensberg, a former executive vice president of Polaroid, wrote: : "Polaroid was not the only body on the trading floor, but it had fallen further than most. Small comfort that the market was universally stricken."

The SX-70 was followed by the company's Polavision instant movie system, which had shortcomings in design, flopped commercially and was pulled off the market in 1979.

The Eastman Kodak Company followed Polaroid into the instant photography industry, only to lose a patent infringement case in 1985, several years after Mr. Land retired. Kodak was forced to leave the business the next year.

A Federal judge ordered Kodak last October to pay $909.4 million in compensation to Polaroid, a sum that was later reduced by $36 million.

In good times and bad, Dr. Land's life was tightly intertwined with the life of the company and of a predecessor, Land-Wheelwright Laboratories, which he co-founded in 1932. Its assets were acquired by Polaroid in 1937. Honorary Doctorates

Besides being Polaroid's chairman, Dr. Land was its president from 1937 to 1975. He was also variously chief executive officer, chief operating officer and director of research. His role in management ended when he stepped down as chairman at the age of 73.

After his retirement, Dr. Land continued to conduct research in several scientific fields. He created and financed the Rowland Institute for Science, a research organization in Cambridge, Mass., which in recent years developed microscopic laser "tweezer" beams able to manipulate single-cell organisms as small as bacteria. He founded the institute in 1980 with a multimillion-dollar gift from his considerable fortune.

His company also had a significant influence on laboratory technology; the rangefinder Polaroid originally invented for its SX-70 camera was also sold to many laboratories for use in the precise electronic measurement of distances.

Dr. Land sometimes described himself as a physicist and inventor, but he was also well versed in chemistry as well as optics and other sciences.

He was also an adviser to the Federal Government on military matters, advocating the use of photographic satellites in orbit to spy on enemy targets several years before such craft or the rockets to launch them came into being.

In 1955, he was chairman of a secret intelligence panel for President Dwight D. Eisenhower that advised a vigorous program to develop advanced means of reconnaissance, including satellites.

The nation's first attempts at launching spy satellites occurred in 1959. In a year, the craft were routinely sending pictures back to earth, opening a new era in military surveillance.

There was a reticent side to Dr. Land's nature, but he could also be charming, magisterial, even imperious. And he had a ferocious capacity for concentration and hard work. He used to observe, with a trace of a smile, "Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess."

Although he never earned a university degree, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in science from Harvard, where he had studied as an undergraduate, and honorary doctorates from other institutions, and the title of doctor came to be widely used with his name. Sunglasses and 3-D Movies

Dr. Land's and Polaroid's numerous inventions and projects in the light-polarization field over the years included sunglasses, camera filters and equipment for three-dimensional movies and for forestalling glare from headlights.

Edwin Herbert Land was born on May 7, 1909, in Norwich, Conn. His parents, Martha F. Land and Harry M. Land, had moved there from Bridgeport, where Harry Land ran a scrap metal and salvage business.

He shone as a student at Norwich Academy, and science and technology began to fascinate him. It was then that he first became intrigued by the polarization of light. A ray of light is polarized if the vibration of its component waves are confined to one direction. Normally, a light ray is made up of waves that vibrate in various directions. Harvard Dropout

The word polarization was first used in an article about light about 1812. More than a century later, in the late 1920's, the young Edwin Land, then living in Manhattan after dropping out of Harvard College, conducted research on the subject at the New York Public Library before devising his first light-polarizing apparatus, which consisted largely of tiny iodide-quinine crystals.

He returned to Harvard but dropped out again, this time for good, in 1932. He then set up Land-Wheelwright Laboratories in Boston with a former Harvard faculty member, George Wheelwright 3d.

The word polaroid, Mr. Wensberg wrote in his book, was coined in 1934 by a Smith College professor who years earlier taught Helen Maislen, who would become Dr. Land's wife. The name Polaroid was given to a plastic light-polarizing material that Land-Wheelwright manufactured, then to the new corporation when it was formed in 1937. Inspiration on Walk

But it was not until he was on a vacation in New Mexico late in 1943 that the fundamental ideas for instant photography came into his head. The inspiration came from his daughter Jennifer. She was 3 years old.

Dr. Land wrote afterward, in an account included in a collection of his papers that was made public years later: "I recall a sunny day in Santa Fe when my little daughter asked why she could not see at once the picture I had just taken of her. As I walked around the charming town, I undertook the task of solving the puzzle she had set me.

"Within an hour, the camera, the film and the physical chemistry became so clear to me."

After painstaking work to flesh out his ideas, Dr. Land demonstrated his new photographic process in 1947 at a scientific meeting in Manhattan. Brown and Sepia Prints

The process entailed exposing the film and then developing the negative at the same time that the print was made: a system of rollers squeezed the exposed film up against the paper that was to become the print.

As the rollers moved the negative and the paper along, they also broke open a small sealed pod attached to the paper. The pod held developing chemicals that the rollers spread between the negative and the paper as a sandwich's spread is applied.

At first the system yielded sepia images, but in 1950 it was altered so that the pictures came out in black and white. Instant Color Photographs

Then, in 1959, a long-held ambition of Dr. Land's was fulfilled: he announced that an instant color-photograph system had been devised at Polaroid. A camera embodying that system went on the market in 1963.

Dr. Land was awarded many honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science. He was on various commissions and was a trustee of the Ford Foundation from 1967 to 1975 and president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences from 1951 to 1953.

Survivors include his wife, the former Helen Maislen, whom he married in 1929, and two daughters, Jennifer and Valerie.

Photo: Edwin H. Land (Associated Press, 1981)(pg. 1); Edwin H. Land with photo from his Polaroid SX-70 camera in 1972. (The New York Times)(pg. 29)